In Thursday's widely ignored framing piece ("Pot & FISA: Linked, but Not How You Think...") about the potentially strange relationship between the campaign for marijuana legalization and the long term implications of the 2008 FISA bill on civil liberties, I speculated that future technologies would magnify the FISA problems of today, many fold.
The article drew the analogy between ways in which the original 1978 FISA failed to anticipate the contemporary digital environment, 30 years later, and imagined that in the digital environment of 2038, another 30 years hence, the same will inevitably occur.
I was so busy writing that diary that I failed to browse my usual geekishly obscure wire services that day. Pity, too, because one item highlighted the problem better than I could have imagined. Check out this gem from the NewScientist.com news service. (more...)
The item, which also came out Thursday, concerns research now underway on a U.S. Navy contract to further develop [already demonstrated] technologies to use certain microwave techniques to create audible sounds within the head of a subject, at some distance away. Ostensibly, this is to be used as a non-lethal irritant mechanism to control unruly crowds, but as the researchers make clear, it can also be used to convey recognizable messages, heard as thought, resembling speech. It must be noted that the microwave beam does not create this effect through the mechanics of the human ear, it is a phenomenon in which the brain directly decodes a signal imposed on the beam.
While longstanding U.S. law forbids you to use traditional shamanic worship plants, such as Cannabis, to modulate your own consciousness and experiential reality, the great gaping holes in 2008 FISA (which many here have pointed out at length) render it totally ineffective at preventing future Alphabet Spooks in the government from doing so, without Due Process and the Warrant required pursuant to the Fourth Amendment. Here is where it gets weird: lots of advancements in bioelectronics now coming off university and government lab benches around the country point to a near future in which several modalities of Brain/Computer Interface emerge, in everything from gaming consoles, to prosthetic limb controls, to, of course, surveillance equipment.
But, these interface techniques are seldom a "one way street". While I dont know yet of any demonstration that your thoughts can be read remotely using a microwave beam, its disconcerting enough to learn that they can definitely now be created that way. With neurochip implants (see the other diary for lots of links), communication in both directions is already possible today. As these interface technologies find their way into consumer electronics as they inevitably will, both the temptation and the capacity of the seedier elements of the intelligence community to employ them in domestic surveillance will increase, exponentially.
All of these technologies are based in Silicon logic, and thus subject to Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns, which means they will increase in capability and decrease in cost by at least a rate consistent with Moore Doubling. This tells us that by the end of the next Administration, as soon as 2012 but no later than 2016, it is likely that we will see a consumer level neurochip implant which effectively combines your Cellphone, PDA, GPS, WiFi Laptop, etc., all into one blazingly fast unit that everyone is going to crave as the latest and greatest thing in go-anywhere 'Consumer Electronics'. Unfortunately, plugging into that kind of direct-to-brain connectivity gives you a lot more to worry about than some hacker kid swiping your credit card number.
While I, like many, wish I had the opportunity to explain all of this to Sen. Obama, and everyone else in Congress who fail to grasp the future implications of FISA in light of emerging technologies, one thing is certain: as these issues emerge over the next decade, Sen. Obama is far better equipped than Grampy Old Fart to cope with their impact on the digital environment - and we, who all inhabit it.